Quote

The government does not have some magic wand that can 'bring down the cost of health care.' It can buy a smaller quantity or lower quality of medical care, as other countries with government-run medical care do.

Thomas Sowell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas Sowell
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: June 30
Economist
University Teacher
Gastonia
North Carolina
Country
Magic
Wand
Health
Wands
Bring
Smaller
Quality
Quantity
Running
Lower
Doe
Medical
Care
Countries
Government
Cost

More quotes by Thomas Sowell

Image
Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Even if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if only the government had spent more.
Thomas Sowell
Image
One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
Thomas Sowell
Image
What is called 'capitalism' might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.
Thomas Sowell
Image
In medicine, it has long been recognized that even a quack remedy that is harmless in itself can be fatal when it substitutes for an effective medication or treatment. The time is overdue for that same recognition to apply to politics.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes
Thomas Sowell
Image
Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.
Thomas Sowell
Image
One of the beauties of an economy coordinated by price movements is that nobody has to understand it in order for it to work.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.
Thomas Sowell
Image
One of the painfully sobering realizations that come from reading history is the utter incompetence that is possible among leaders of whole nations and empires - and the blind faith that such leaders can nevertheless inspire among the people who are enthralled by their words or their posturing.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Since the government creates no wealth, it can only transfer the wealth required to hire people. Even if the government creates a million jobs, that is not a net increase in jobs, when the money that pays for those jobs is taken from the private sector, which loses that much ability to create private jobs.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Riskier mortgage lending practices, imposed by government, were what set the stage for many mortgage payments to stop and thus for the financial disasters that followed. Political rhetoric, echoed in the media, seeks to obscure that painfully plain fact.
Thomas Sowell
Image
A passionate commitment to social justice is no substitute for knowing what the hell you're talking about.
Thomas Sowell
Image
Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.
Thomas Sowell
Image
As long as human beings are imperfect, there will always be arguments for extending the power of government to deal with these imperfections. The only logical stopping place is totalitarianism -- unless we realize that tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The freedom of America is the freedom to live your own life and take your own chances.
Thomas Sowell
Image
The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.
Thomas Sowell